Shell Game:Book One
by Sketchpad
Summary: A game is being played on Jimmy Neutron...a game of epic proportions.Friends and Foes are not who they seem and what was once certain, is no longer. A game is being played, and by the time Jimmy learns the rules,it may already be too late...
1. Chapter 1

Chapter One

The dawn of the sun angled across the station's four huge sensor-comm panels that radiated from its center base, giving the station the rough appearance of a mammoth, floating ceiling fan. A fact that was not lost on the onlookers, news helicopter pilots and the ground crews of the Retroville Municipal Airport more than a thousand feet below it.

The same morning light softly probed its way into the station's interior through a clear dome at the very top, where it touched the harsh illumination of the base's surviving lighting coming from the damaged command deck below and was consumed. To Jimmy Neutron, it all just meant that he would be late for school. Very late.

Small mounds of wrecks, the laser-carved hulks of armed robots, lay at his and government agent Jet Fusion's feet, as their electrical fire-induced smoke, coupled with the smoke from ruined consoles and monitor banks on their side of the chamber, gave the shafts of sunlight from overhead strength to glow and give the indoor battlefield an ethereal look.

On the far side of the room, delineated by the heavy smoke, stood a small, balding man with Coke-bottle glasses that made his already weak eyes look like frail specks. Flanking protectively to either side of him were floating, squat machines, the same ones whose destroyed brethren decorated the intruders' side of the room. With their powerful, singular eyes they tried to scan through of the cloud cover.

Every so often, one of the machines, called SecuriBots, would get a faint, ghostly image lock on one or both of the intruders and fire, but would miss due to either fast reflexes on the targets' part or the machine mistakenly firing on the afterimage the smoke would create. The man didn't much care.

For him, what was crucially important was the console he stood guard over and glanced at every so often. Among the myriad switches, knobs, dials and buttons that coated the surface of the control panel, a single large LED dominated the center of the panel. A clock that ticked down instead of up and was just finished with the hours and now was running down minutes. Something the small man noted with unhidden glee.

"Neutron! Fusion!" the man called out. "You're both a day late and a dollar short. The two of you couldn't possibly destroy my ASP base in time to save the airplanes that are even now flying in dangerous patterns and threatening to crash into each other."

"Is that why you've set up your base over the airport?" Jimmy asked. "Sheesh, if you're missing your luggage, just complain to the airline like the rest of us, don't take it out on the passengers."

"Funny, Neutron," said the man. "But your levity won't change the situation. Hovering over this airport and disrupting air traffic will prove to the fools below that nothing in the skies can stop my A-S-P, my Air Supremacy Platform, and after I've killed you two and the airplanes crash into each other, I'm going to make my list of demands known to the soon-to-be-grounded."

He reached over and tapped a flat button off to the side and monitors, the few that survived the battle thus far and surrounded the command deck, flickered to life and a computer animation, an elaborate simulation, played out on the screens.

"This base's communications array can generate anything from long-range EM bursts and comm-jamming static, to instrument-failing radio frequency deflection," he said as the animation showed different images of energy radiating from the large vanes of the wire frame ASP base. It seemed strange to the young inventor and the government agent watching, that the man sounded like he was giving a presentation at a board meeting, rather than gloating at the devilish fruition of a deadly plan, but he continued.

"Right now, I'm generating a scrambler field all around the base but I'm allowing small windows in the field so the news copters can get really nice close-ups of my glorious base. Still, the pilots out there are realizing that they better keep their distance if they want to keep what little control they have," he railed. "No jet fighter, no missile, no vehicle that flies and uses instruments to navigate can withstand my field without flying headlong into the ground. But that's not even the best part."

"Do tell," Jet Fusion quipped.

"I will. Within this base are missile silos, and in the warheads of the hundreds and hundreds of missiles therein are deployable containers, each holding a miniature ASP transmitter linked to this station."

The animation now showed dotted lines curving away from the base in high trajectories.

"Once launched, the missiles will fly to every corner of the Earth, releasing their payloads across the sky. Each transmitter, like this base, is solar-powered, disrupt aircraft, can stay aloft via anti-grav generators, and will give my base constant surveillance of the skies."

A wire frame of the Earth was now shown with a global network of glowing dots enshrouding it.

"Soon, my network will give me uncontested dominion of the skies in every direction. No aerial trade, traffic or warfare will be tolerated without paying my price," he concluded with a laugh. "Their tribute to me, the lord of the firmament!"

Jet prepared to shoot the man one of his brash trademark retorts and expected Jimmy to fire out one of his own, but Jimmy simply stared at the villain for a long introspective moment. Jet didn't need to read the boy's body language to know that the mad scientist in _Jimmy_ was suitably intrigued.

"That's pretty good," Jimmy admitted truthfully. It was evil, true, but effective.

"Why, thank you," the would-be tyrant gushed off-guard.

Silence.

"No, really. That's pretty good."

Jet had heard enough. "Give it up, Calamitous!" the agent quickly ordered through the haze, still keeping his distance, and raising an intercepting hand in front of Jimmy to soundlessly suggest that he do likewise. Jimmy, brought out of his _own _daydreams of social change via rampant superscience, sheepishly obeyed.

"Never!" was the expected reply, followed by a salvo of red beams flashing out from the fading smoke to burn the air where the agent and inventor stood moments before they dove away. The beams, however, did stab into more consoles, monitor banks and the backs of the worker drones who were momentarily working there.

"You should have programmed your SecuriBots to understand fire discipline, Professor" Jimmy taunted while rolling to a wary crouch a few feet from Jet. "They're doing more damage to you than _we_ are."

"And you should have minded your business, Neutron," Calamitous shot back. "I'll have to finish you _now_ instead of at a time and place of my choosing. I wonder if the Big Top Secret Organization does group funerals?" He finished the rejoinder with another salvo at Jimmy's apparent location. With the smoke thinning due to the ventilation systems finally getting a handle on things, his robots' aim grew distressingly better

Jimmy could feel the lethal heat of the beams wash around his feet and legs and he hopped and rolled clumsily away again. _They were trying to cut my legs out from under me_, he surmised.

"Jimmy!"

The boy turned to the sound of Jet and risked a moment to see him wave Jimmy over to where the man now crouched behind, a section of upper deck and support beam that had fallen earlier.

The smoke began to dissipate and Jimmy could now clearly see the diminutive Professor Finbarr Calamitous and his six surviving SecuriBots. The machines created a protective ring around the small man and tracked their weapons to Jimmy's new position.

Jimmy fearfully berated himself for standing still and knew he would be dead when the command to fire left the robots' processors and entered their guns, all of a few nanoseconds' time.

Then the command switched to one of reacquiring a new target, when a piece of metal ricocheted off the optic panel of the lead machine, drawing it and its comrades' attention to the angle of its origin: _Jet's_ position.

Jimmy tore off towards Jet, thankful for the agent's distracting throw, and almost pitched forward into a crashing fall as he hastily sacrificed balance for the chance to manipulate his watch's built-in laser.

The lead SecuriBot decided that Jet, attacking last, was the greater threat and burst-transmitted the order for the rest of its team to maximize firepower at the structure Jet was using as cover.

The leader angled its weapon arm at the structure, and then suffered a sudden, catastrophic failure along its higher brain functions, as the narrow beam from Jimmy's watch burned a clean, smoldering hole through its cranial shell, melting delicate components and chips directly, and frying connective wiring with the beam's residual heat. The lead SecuriBot froze into place and then simply crashed to the floor in a lobotomized heap.

In the tight seconds it took for the remaining machines to reassign one of their number to the position of the new lead, Jimmy slid into Jet as the man tucked the boy closer to himself and the center of the barricade, making sure no extremity was exposed to be targeted.

"You okay, kid?" Jet asked with the breathlessness of a close call.

"Yeah, Jet," Jimmy said shakily. "Thanks for distracting them for me."

"Same here. They could've blew this little piggie's house down, big time."

They both cringed as ear-ringing concussions and gradual heat build-up signaled the start of the robots' final assault on the makeshift barrier.

"There are still five of them out there," Jimmy said soberly. "They _could_ outflank us."

Jet frowned at that. Jimmy was right and it was just a miracle that the machines hadn't thought of that sooner, or else he would have been overrun. They still could be.

Jet securely patted his service firearm in his jacket in a comforting gesture. It was spent of ammo earlier while he made his way to the command deck, not knowing that the boy Neutron had also made his way in, by flying via jet-pack to the top of the command deck's glass dome and laser-cutting his way in.

He picked up a length of metal bar that had once been a minor support to the upper floor section now being used as a barricade. Its end was torn and twisted by stress into a crude chisel point.

"Well, I got me a can-opener," Jet said with faded joviality. "What about you? How much juice you still got in that watch?"

Despite the noise of the attack, Jimmy calmly moved fingers across the open panels of his chronometer and checked readings that made his youthful face somber.

"Not much. I used the majority of the laser's charge cutting through the dome above us. I didn't know Calamitous made it out of carbonium," Jimmy reported sourly. "The rest of the charge was spent fighting off that last wave of SecuriBots and taking out the leader just now. If I divert all remaining power to the laser, I might _damage_ a few, but I doubt it."

"It'll have to do," Jet decided grimly. He stood in crouch and gestured to Jimmy that he stay where he was. "I'm gonna see what they're up to."

"Be careful, Jet," Jimmy warned as his fingers tapped tiny buttons that gave commands to the watch's energy distribution.

When he was satisfied with the results, Jimmy glanced up at Jet as the agent shot his head up past the edge of the barricade and they swiftly ducked back down into a crouching position again.

"You're right, Jimmy. They're flanking," he said while struggling to get a better grip on his weapon than his sweaty palms could provide. "Two on my side, three on yours. Switch places."

Jimmy knew why in a coldly logical flash. With the destruction of the old leader, the new lead robot realized that _Jimmy _had to be a greater threat with his watch, so it came to the conclusion to overwhelm the _boy_ and the survivors could decimate Fusion soon after.

But that logical voice, however loudly it explained things, couldn't drown out the singular fact that at least he had a fighting chance with his laser. Jet, with his crowbar-like weapon, was less likely to survive.

"Jet, I set my laser to wide-dispersal. It should damage my three or take out at least two of them. But you'd be overwhelmed by superior numbers in seconds if we switch," Jimmy explained quickly, while wondering if his breathlessness was due to talking fast or to the knowledge that his time had just about come.

"I told you to change places with me, kid," Fusion ordered while twisting his head to follow the pulsing whirr of the killing machines' anti-grav propulsion. He wasn't in the mood to be the one who would have to tell his parents that their son had died, if he managed to survive, himself. "That wasn't a request, either."

"But-" Jimmy sputtered as he felt the strong hand of Jet slam into his chest, clutch a handful of shirt and effortlessly start to lift him to where Fusion was about vacate.

"No!" Jimmy cried, just as his peripheral vision caught the sight of the three rounding the side of the barrier, weapon arms raised.

Out of reflex, he shot his arm up and a spreading cascade of red energy firehosed from the tiny jewel emitter in the watch.

Jimmy gritted his teeth at the sudden searing pain of high temperature threatening to cook the back of his hand, but he held the arm still as the laser's heat distorted outer shells, cracked optic panels, consumed sensor material and set fires within. Damage that was mirrored in the internals of the doomed timepiece, as the jewel in the center of the beam emitter built into the watch's tiny communication dish glowed, smoked and then shattered with a quiet pop and the watch itself became too hot to wear, its compressed tritium battery spent and sizzling.

Jimmy tore the dead device from his tortured wrist and stared at the ravaged droids. The fronts of their body shells were ruined, exposed circuitry smoldered and was blackened, and servos, actuators and hydraulic systems were deformed by the heat blast. But they still stood, to Jimmy and Jet's horror. They were listing, half-blind and almost gutted, but they still stood.

Their hard drives, those that survived by virtue of just being far enough inside the robots to be shielded by everything else, ran remaining imperatives, target lists and contingency plans, and realized mathematically, logically, _stubbornly, _that the machines still had some fight left in them.

Jittering weapon arms and partially working targeting computers worked in struggling concert along with their still intact comrades', who covered Jet from behind.

Jet released Jimmy, who took a cautious step behind Jet as the agent stood his full height and brandished his melee weapon.

Jimmy couldn't help feeling the fear that punched into his heart or the shame of not being able to help Jet more.

"I'm sorry, Jet," Jimmy moaned, his large, sad blue eyes still analyzing the situation, however dire. "I thought I could get them off of you."

In spite of everything, Fusion smiled his best smile yet at the boy. "That's okay, partner. You did what you could." He said nothing more but he kept the smile up. He wanted Jimmy to know that it would be alright, that they did their best, that death, for the brave, was temporary.

The flashes of light and heat thundering around them was quick and final.

The cored bodies of the five SecuriBots that lay in smoking heaps was testament to the weapons' devastating efficiency. Weapons that resided in the cooling, unblinking eyes of the robot dog that yapped happily through the wreckage towards his young master.

"Goddard!" Jimmy yelled in joy as he hugged his pet around the neck and squeezed affectionately. "You tracked my signal before the watch gave out. Good boy! Good boy!"

Jet was caught off-guard. "Wait! How did Goddard make it here past the scrambler field? It should have grounded him, too."

Jimmy just chuckled at their good fortune. "Remember Calamitous saying he allowed small windows in the field to let the news helicopters come in close? I sent a distress signal to Goddard and he managed to find one of the windows." He then hugged his dog again and rubbed his domed head briskly. "Didn't you, boy? That's my good boy," he cooed at Goddard.

"Too little, too late, you meddlers," Calamitous chided, feeling utterly stupid about letting his ego compromise his security. "More SecuriBots are on their way and the countdown is nearly over. Soon my missiles will spread my ASP net across the globe. The earth _will_ pay tribute to me for the use of the heavens!"

The laughter that rang became a hollow accompaniment to the automated voice still counting down the few remaining minutes into even more uncomfortable seconds.

"We gotta reach the missile silos, Jimmy," Fusion said as he brushed himself off and looked around for the exit.

"Way ahead of ya, Jet. Goddard, do a chemical scan for large concentrations of rocket fuel." said Jimmy.

Goddard's nose pointed up in the air as microfilters sifted errant molecules of liquid oxygen and petroleum based polymer chains used in propellants. Tense moments passed and then his chest plate swung up, revealing a small monitor that quickly displayed a schematic of the base and a direct path winding down to a wide, central deck below the command deck, studded and ringed with miniature ports.

"Jackpot," exclaimed Jet.

After a reckless run avoiding arriving SecuriBots through Red Alert-lit corridors and express elevators, the three heroes charged through a hastily hot-wired set of thick armored doors that opened up to vast, circular chamber controlled and monitored by a single, omni-functional control pedestal several yards ahead.

"Goddard, weld the doors," Jimmy ordered as he and Jet scrambled to the console, eager to stop the missile launch, but not feeling too optimistic in succeeding.

Goddard's powerful optic beams lanced to a superheated point along the spaces where door slid across doorway tracks, glowing the edges and melding the metal together into a sealed wall.

Just then, the concussive booms of SecuriBot blasters pounded against the centers of the doors, intent on softening the armor and eventually melting their way in. Already the middle of the doors were starting to slightly brighten and smoke.

A warning bark from the canoid brought that fact to the two humans' attention.

"They sure are persistent," Jet muttered as he looked over the control panel and single use monitor.

Jimmy cupped his hand under his chin and pondered what he was seeing. The launch bay was huge and reminiscent of an Roman amphitheatre, but where the surrounding tiered seating would be, thousands of thin missiles on short, 45-degree angled launch tracks, propped up against raised, individual blast walls, dominated the chamber. They faced an equal number of missile ports lining the far, curving walls of the room that opened out into the immediate sky.

Something in the back of Neutron's mind told him that a solution was not long in coming every time he looked at the seemingly endless brace of projectiles. It was just having trouble coming up to the surface.

"Got any ideas?" Jet asked, preferring to watch Jimmy think rather than hear the doors' strength wane with each shot or depressing himself by looking at the missile banks.

"I'm working it out, Jet," Jimmy said thoughtfully. "Something about the missiles could help, but I'm not sure yet." His eyes kept scanning the missiles' casings, their engines, their size. "Something...something that was said." Their color...their...

"That's it!" Jimmy shouted. "Their warheads!"

Jet paused. "What about 'em? They won't blow up or anything because there's no explosives in them. Calamitous said that he just put those little transmitters in the warheads."

"Precisely!" Jimmy poured all of his attention over the various keypads and soon found the one that inputted commands to the launch computer, and from it, to the processors that served as the missiles' brains. His hands flashed over the keys to reprogram and then stopped dead above them, his eyes wide with worry.

"Pukin' Pluto!" he swore aloud. "I-I need the security codes for this computer or I can't tell it what I want it to do! I don't have time to hack in!"

"No problem," Jet said as he reached into his inside jacket pocket. He pulled out a folded sheet a paper and handed it to Jimmy. "The _BTSO's_ hackers managed to get their hands on this little beauty. My mission was to capture Calamitous and destroy this place. Failing that, I was to shut down the computers with this."

Jimmy opened the paper and saw two strings of alphanumerical code, a long string over a short one.

"That line of numbers, there, is a backdoor code through the computer network," Jet said.

"And the second, shorter set?"

"Hmm?" Jet looked over at the paper. "Oh! Uh, that's Beautiful Gorgeous' phone number. I said I'd look her up after she escaped from prison," he said sheepishly.

That threw Jimmy for a second, but he recovered, saying, "Yes, well, this will do just fine. Now I can access the computer that feeds targeting information to the missiles."

"Why?"

"So I can make the missiles do our job for us," Jimmy explained as his fingers blurred across the keyboard like a pianist on a caffeine high. Only when the control pedestal's only monitor screen displayed green confirming text, did he stop typing and momentarily admired his sabotage.

"Did you do it?" Jet asked tensely.

"I believe so, but we better get out of here while we've got the chance. If all goes well, we _won't _want to be here," Jimmy told him, then turned to face his dog. "Goddard, Skycycle mode."

Goddard barked twice then began to initiate a physical transformation. His tube-like legs elongated and bent back as his body began to hover. Ports that led to flexible, internal rocket thrust nozzles, opened in the centers on his metal paws. His ears angled back to act as handlebars and a sissy bar extended out from where the base of his spine would have been.

Jimmy straddled Goddard without preamble and coasted to where Jet was standing nearby.

"Hop on!"

"You don't have to tell me twice," quipped Jet as he quickly sat behind Jimmy. Goddard's anti-grav drive and thrusters sang a song of mild protest as he compensated for the extra weight and then, through Jimmy's urgent body English, he rose smoothly up and banked towards one of the missile ports.

From the corner of their eyes, Goddard's passengers saw a pinkish flash as the crimson light of the SecuriBots' weapons ripped a hole in the welded doors roughly wide enough to hover through.

Bolts of energy zinged up and around the three as Goddard put on more speed, dipped under a warhead, and then accelerated through one of the port's short tunnels and away into the morning sky.

Below the three escapees, they could make out the clusters of firefighters, news crews and national guard members milling around the runways, wisely not directly underneath the ASP base, but near enough to act when needed.

"Goddard," Jimmy ordered, his voice barely audible in the bracing wind that buffeted them as they flew father away. "Land us over by the terminal. This gonna be good."

The robot obeyed, gradually descending at an angle that took them over and past the authorities on the tarmac and then coming to a gentle stop in front of one of the terminal's panoramic windows overlooking the runways and the open field beyond.

After Jimmy and Jet dismounted and Goddard return to his previous configuration, they all looked up and watched the base, while Jimmy quietly counted down the remaining seconds of the countdown he heard as they made good their escape.

"One!" Jimmy called out, as suddenly, like a fireworks show, missiles, roaring, fired out in rapid salvos from the circumference of the floating station.

Like in the simulation, the missiles soared in high trajectories away from the base. Unlike the simulation, however, the missiles didn't continue on to their destined flight paths, but simply detonated above and around the ASP base, releasing tiny globes that glittered in the morning light and surrounded the station.

"Come on, come on," Jimmy chanted under his breath as the clouds of metallic dots just hung there innocently in their hovering holding patterns.

Then a sharp blue flash, like a lightning stroke, rippled across the broad communications array, followed by flaming surface explosions made tiny and sonically out-of-sync by distance. For the three who were watching, it was quite the show.

Then the miracle Jimmy was praying for came to pass. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the station began to lose altitude, crashing through the bottom of the cloud of turncoat transmitters and actually pitching and tumbling in the merciless clutches of freefall, with the helplessness of a baby chick falling from a nest in slow-motion. The people on the runways broke into panicked runs as the base quickly darkened the ground around them with its ponderous shadow.

Trucks and jeeps soon scattered with their passengers, all of them racing haphazardly towards the main gates. Jimmy, Jet and Goddard could hear the frightened and incredulous gasps from the airport staff and patrons who watched, as they did, the mammoth swan song of the base from the wide terminal windows behind them.

Jimmy's heart was caught in his chest as he unconsciously held his breath, awaiting the titanic impact to come. It reminded him strongly of the ill-fated landing of The Hindenberg in Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1939. Like that crash, it would be fiery and it would be final. Well worth missing school for.

Jimmy's reverie was broken by Goddard's insistent barking and Jet's sudden pointing at the doomed structure. "Look!" he told the boy.

From the closeness of the station, just before its crushing fall, Jimmy could just make out a glittering red object flying out of the top of the ASP base, where its glass dome would have been located. Yet, the object didn't fall with the parabolic freedom of its fellow debris. Instead, it stabilized in flight and gained noticeable speed in a direction contrary to the path of the station.

It banked in its flight and headed out from the airport, but in doing so, it came close enough over the terminal that Jimmy could see what it was that made his companions excitable. It was a large red and chrome robot, rocketing away with built-in jets in its feet. Its design, beady eyed countenance and hinged, heavy-set jaws were all too familiar to him.

"Calamitous' robot," Jimmy said bitterly to himself, and was more than convinced that the professor was piloting it, as was his custom. Although it wasn't in Jimmy's nature to wish the mad scientist dead, it was somewhat disheartening to see him escape justice. It made the hard-won victory seem sadly pyrhic.

But the thoughts of his enemy still on the loose to cause strife to him, his friends and family, and the world at large, was jarringly broken when the sound and tremors of Doomsday ripped into him.

The base struck the tarmac, distorting it into a cracked, hellish, kilometers-wide crater. The raw weight of it caused the blade-like communications array to fold, break apart, and flip up gracefully into the smoke-darkened air above it.

The kinetic energy of the crash flattened the station and made its center bulge outward until it breeched and ruptured, like a crushed jelly donut, blasting flaming wreckage, ruined decks and vaporized rocket fuel in all directions.

Although Jimmy and his companions were, luckily, far enough away to avoid the firestorm of shrapnel that the disaster gave birth to, the devastating shockwave and thermal front that accompanied it, stripped the balance from their legs and threw them to the quivering ground with ridiculous ease. The people in the terminal behind them screamed as they, too, were knocked to the floor and the windows surrendered to the energy of the localized man-made earthquake and shattered into glassy rain.

Jet didn't want to get up right away. He swore he could see the concrete undulate like a swell. He simply waited until he was sure the trembling totally subsided before slowly sitting up and brushing off his jacket and knees.

"You okay, kid?" he asked, after Jimmy began to recover from his fall.

Jimmy sat up and exhaled a pent up sigh, "Yeah." Then he stared out at the now settling, blazing destruction that marked the passage of the Aerial Supremacy Platform. "Leaping Leptons! That was too close. Good thing no one was hurt, but Calamitous got away."

"Yeah," Jet said. "But don't worry, he'll be caught. Guys like him? They always think with their ego." He looked off in the distance, away from the wreck of the ASP base, and could see familiar shapes approach. "Here come the planes."

On the unoccupied runways surrounding the burning station, planes, who were freed from the station's debilitating field, began landing, one after the other.

As the news crews and firefighters in their trucks, and the national guardsmen in their jeeps and transports, started to return to the airfield to secure the area and interview potential witnesses, Jimmy suddenly looked crestfallen.

"Great. I'm way too late to go to school now. The last thing I need is to have Ms. Fowl or Principal Willoughby reading me The Riot Act," he muttered.

Jet tugged on the collar of his leather jacket and Jimmy could see the man engage in a short conversation with it. Then Jet stood up and helped the youngster to his feet.

"Hey, you saved my bacon back there," he told Jimmy. "I don't know how _you_ knew he was behind all this, but I owe you one."

Jimmy was about to let his modesty speak for him when a black sedan rolled into view and then stopped a short distance away.

"She may guzzle gas," Jet quipped, "But it'll get you there in style. And I'll put in a good word for you with your teachers and the principal without spilling the beans about what happened here. National security, and all that."

"I really appreciate it, Jet. Thanks." Jimmy said as he stepped into the back seat and patted the seat next to him. "Come on, Goddard. Come on, boy."

Goddard happily bounded into the car and was followed by the dusty, yet swaggering, Fusion.

As the car began to pull away from the chaos of the airport, Jimmy spared one last glance at the remains of Calamitous' latest dream of power and global extortion. He was thankful that the equipment in his lab had detected the high energy signatures coming from the outskirts of town that morning, and that he opted to investigate rather that head straight to school.

Skill. He had been blessed with it in abundance. With an IQ of 210 that wrought a storehouse of inventions that rivaled the reverse engineering wizardry of Area 51, he was the prodigy of a generation. It was no small irony that his name was Neutron, for like the power of that bomb, his intelligence could explode across the plains of scientific endeavor, vaporizing preconceived notions and flattening outdated technological plateaus. It was a gift, a power few possessed, and it came with a heavy, moral price.

The price of The Path. The choice to use his genius for good or ill.

He knew he was no saint, that at times he failed to listen to the voices of his better angels. Such was the folly of youth and such was the folly of prideful arrogance. But he acted with clear conscience when seeing those also with power use that power to injure, to ruin, to conquer. It was the embracing of the moral path and the using of his genius and luck as a bulwark against the dark that earned him so many enemies.

And it _was_ lucky that Jet was also on the scene, and it was _lucky_ that Goddard was on hand to save them both, and that he could detonate the missiles early and _just_ fool them into thinking that the ASP base was just a lowly aircraft trying to evade the effects of the transmitters.

Luck. It was such a limited commodity. One a recent twelve year old like himself was using as though it ran as freely as water, another natural resource. And if he knew anything about natural resources, he knew that they were, more often than not, finite. Such thoughts gave him an edge of wisdom that he never discounted, especially with a young life so full of enemies as his had. But, he also had to admit, sometimes Fighting The Good Fight made him feel far older than his time, and he honestly wondered if it would ever end.

With a tired, melancholy sigh, he adjusted his school jet backpack, settled further in his seat, patted his dog's head and absently thought about the rest of the day.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

The Antares Z-class sedan's angular, aerodynamic chassis and its radiation-shield tinted windows gave the sports car/spacecraft hybrid a swift look, even though it sat impotently in the doorway of the garage of the Neutrons' suburban home, panels and down-sloped nose opened, fluid settled in small puddles around the parts, tools and small prone body of the mechanic who was hard at work in the car's now unsealed undercarriage.

Carl and Sheen strolled from up the small street, watching from their distance, a sneakered foot just barely extended from the under the large vehicle, moving to the beat to a rock song coming from the sound system in the car's spacious interior.

"Hey, guys!" came the familiar high voice from below the car. "I'll be with you in a minute. Just working on some after market modifications to my baby. What's up?"

"Oh, nothing much, Jimmy," Carl demurred. "But how did you know it was us?"

"Well, one of the components I was reattaching was a relay to one of the car's sensor suites," Jimmy explained. "With my diagnostic/calibration unit patched in, I ran a cursory scan and detected you two."

"Oh..." Carl and Sheen intoned in mindless faux-understanding. Sheen was the first to break through the spell of supposed techno-babble.

"Anyway, that was the absolute coolness, you and Jet Fusion crashing Professor Calamitous' super weapon this morning," he gushed in his usually grating voice. "Ha! _Adventure, _truly the most important meal of the day!"

"Well, it almost became my _last_ meal, Sheen. I think Calamitous is getting a little better at the Mad Scientist Game." Jimmy muttered aloud with a sigh. "Wanna cruise Saturn for awhile, guys? I don't feel like being cooped up here. I wanna just take off for awhile."

"Sure, Jimmy," Sheen perked up. "Just so long as we don't come back too late. My pop's making Sloppy Joes tonight."

"No problem. Could one of you hand me the magneto-spanner?"

"What's it look like?" Carl asked, bending down to pick among the strange tools lying on the driveway.

"It look like a small monkey wrench with a power source built into its handle."

Carl began to look harder, wracking his mind to match shape recognition to the mystery device and flustering all the way. Jimmy could hear him hyperventilate from under the car.

"Carl...Carl, relax. I'll get it. Don't worry."

Jimmy was about to orient his body to the side to reach out and fish for the tool, when the device was suddenly extended to him, stopping just short of his face.

From his position, he couldn't see past the middle of the spanner's shaft.

"Thanks, Carl," he said while taking the tool proffered him. "I should be done in a few minutes."

"Uh, I didn't find it, Jimmy," came Carl's nervous reply.

"Sheen?"

"Dude, I couldn't find it even if I knew what you were talking about," Sheen confessed.

Jimmy was at a loss. If they didn't hand him the tool, who else was out there? He twisted his body to grab his diagnostic device and then peered into its small screen. The basic, low-res wire frames of Sheen and Carl stood to the side of the Antares. This wasn't right.

He scooted bodily from the undercarriage and took a look at the two men dressed in non-descript black suits, ties, and matching sunglasses standing stiffly over his pensive friends.

"Let me guess," Jimmy said as he deduced the reason he couldn't detect the newcomers. "Stealth suits?"

The closest man from the boy offered him his hand and helped Jimmy to his feet.

"James Isaac Neutron," the man in black intoned, "Your country needs you."

"I know, but I can't run for president until after college. I told you guys this," Jimmy quipped, looking for a reaction in his stoic audience and finding none. "Hmm. No sense of humor present," he mock-analyzed. "You're both either real ambitious undertakers, or you both work for the BTSO."

Upon hearing Jimmy mention the organization, the lead's companion said, "Commander Baker requests your presence for a ultra high level meeting being held now."

"Your expertise is crucial to this matter," the lead man in black added.

Sheen, heedless of the weight of the conversation, twitched in manic glee at the thought of another adventure. "Did someone say..._ultra_?"

The flanking man in black picked up on the Latino boy's mood in a heartbeat. "Negative. Orders are to bring Jimmy Neutron to the meeting. No civilians."

"But the two of them are honorary agents of the BTSO," Jimmy appealed to the two men, "Couldn't they come with me?"

"Negative, Agent Neutron," the lead said, not noticing or choosing not to notice the slight, prideful smirk and straightened posture that being called "Agent" produced in the boy. "Only authorized personnel are requested. That means you."

Jimmy's heart went out to his buddies, who wilted, crestfallen. "Sorry, fellas. Don't worry, I'll tell you all about it when I get back. It's probably the commander telling me that they've found Calamitous," he said, trying to cheer them up with a wan smile. He then turned to his escorts.

"Let me finish putting my things away and then I'll go with you," he told them.

The two agents nodded and stood ramrod still as Jimmy collected his tools, rags and disconnected car parts and put them in the garage. Then he wiped his greasy hands on his rag, tossed it into the garage, as well, and then walked with the agents to their waiting black sedan, leaving his friends feeling put out and more than a little apprehensive.

_They could be seen cresting over the eerily green planet's terminator as iron-gray dots. _

_As they came over to the brighter side of Yolkus, its sun brought the objects' details in to sharp clarity. They flew in a loose formation; gigantic semi-aerodynamic vessels sporting as few ports and windows as necessary, their engines massive and hearty, their radiation-scarred, armored hulls resolute, their guns, belligerent and ready._

_From below, a fleet of Yolkian warships were spiraling up through the atmosphere on an intercept course, looking, for all the world, like a flock of gleaming, steel rubber chickens._

_Despite their comical appearance, the Yolkian task force of three _Cock-a-doodle-Doom _Class destroyers, two _Capon_ Class corvettes, one _Hatchery_ Class starfighter carrier and a _Henn_ Class hospital frigate following at a safe distance, gave a curious air of menace as the beaks of their flat, vertical "heads" opened wide, exposing a main weapons port that began to glow as green and energetic as the shield projectors that ringed the ships' upper "bodies" and "necks", and the Bussard Collectors that ran across the length of their thruster "legs". _

_As the Yolkian vessels reached orbital space, their heads, which were angled down both in a default position and as a ready position for planetary bombardment, slowly rose up to the invaders, as though the ships had just began to notice their opposing number._

_The invading fleet slowed to orbital station-keeping, maintaining their position over the planet, yet keeping a distance from the defenders, as if watching what they would do next._

_For a moment, both fleets hung in the stars, ponderous and unmoving. Then, all at once, the invaders fired on the Yolkians._

_The forward-most destroyer took the brunt of the barrage, its energy shields dissipating and absorbing as much as they were able before they collapsed and the front and right side of its head crumpled, the kinetic energy of the blasts threatening to rip the head off of its neck structure._

_Attacking the lead ship in the fleet, however, gave the Yolkian commanders in the other destroyers time to pull ahead quickly into wide flanking positions, taking fire from the lead invading fleet's large escort vessels. They swung into graceful, near-bootlegger turns and slowed into perpendicular angles from the lead opposing ships, then fired their pulsing, emerald disruptors into their broadsides._

_As the destroyers engaged the enemy, the Yolkian corvettes eased back into escort positions around the _Hatchery_ Class carrier. Once they were settled protectively near the carrier, the Hatchery began to open the two topside hatches that ran the length of its broad back, hatches that revealed hangar elevators that were now raising their fighters into launch positions._

_Scores of diminutive starfighters that looked like gold and green metallic chicks, rested row upon row along the now exposed deck of the mother ship. On the chick-fighters' backs sported a single high canopy which was simply the familiar dome of a Yolkian travel pod, plugged in, each one crewed with a amorphous blob of a pilot._

_When they were ready, the _Fledgling_ Attack Starfighters exploded off the larger ship like pollen in a strong breeze, a breeze that took them on a course to down the enemy escort ships._

_The wing of fighters closed rapidly with the enemy frigates who were harassing the destroyers, and divided themselves into squadrons, then four fighter elements that were given tasks of either shooting down or bombing their targets._

_Two flights of _Fledgling_ bombers made tight, fast runs at one of the lead corvettes. Their compatriots, another flight flying close to escort them, disabled a prime target, an aft shield generator._

_From the bellies of the bombers, a hatch split in two and rocketed egg-shaped projectiles surged out of their bays. All along the surface of the now vulnerable corvette, _Bad Egg _bomb explosions blossomed, tearing hull and vital engineering decks into depressurized scrap yards, and irradiating everything else near them._

_The corvette's engines began to vibrate hard enough to be seen from the fighters' cockpits, internal detonations doomed the power cores and the surrounding magnetic containment fields. Then the explosion came, buckling the craft amidships and tearing the aft section free._

_The Yolkian fighters broke away from the stricken ship and gurgled in triumph when they saw the forward and rear sections of the ship, propelled by the momentum of its detonation and trailing flames, detritus and corpses, drive into the command elevations of a nearby destroyer and the side of another corvette, respectively._

_The fighters were grouping together to make a run for one of the battlecruisers that was pounding a _Cock-a-doodle-Doom _destroyer, the Royal Aeronavy Ship _Cluck of War_, to a flaming standstill, when another ship from the enemy fleet, coming from its rear, moved up with grim speed._

_It was longer and leaner in construction that the heavier ships of the line and made a straight course towards the largest concentration of Yolkian fighters in the engagement, the ones who were presently hounding a wounded battlecruiser that broke formation to get out of the fight._

_The fighters, detecting the new ship, split their forces into two units, one to continue the attack on the battlecruiser and the other to disable the incoming craft._

_When Group Two reached the lengthy ship, the pilots noticed that it had more sensor equipment bristling from its hull than the others, and that its gun turrets, while much smaller, were also more numerous, covering at least seventy percent of the ship's surface._

_Group Two divided tasks between bombing and disabling, and were diving closer to began their runs, when the entire group was shredded by a thorn bush of deadly anti-starfighter fire._

_Group One broke engagement immediately upon seeing the victorious ship, a fast frigate designed specifically to act as an enemy starfighter screen, close in on them, powerful, compact turrets dispatching panicked Yolkian pilots with their touch of death._

_Those pilots whose fighters were too badly damaged to fly on, detached themselves from them to make it to the hospital frigate or their carrier on their own power. Most were vaporized by enemy fire, but some were drawn screaming into the battlecruisers by tractor beam, prisoners of this sudden war._

_By all accounts, the battle seemed evenly matched, with warships on both sides burning with wounds or destroyed outright. Then, the enemy fleet inexplicably began to pull away from the engagement, slowly chugging away from Yolkus' gravity well, its stragglers trying to keep up mightily._

_Just as fast, the Yolkian fleet regrouped as surviving Fledglings and lone pilots finally reached the safety of the carrier and hospital vessel, and then gave chase hotly._

_Although all three Yolkian destroyers were heavily damaged, they opened fire with everything they had, severely crippling the anti-starfighter frigate and a battlecruiser's engines. Both ship were now listing out of formation and getting left behind._

_As the Yolkians closed in for the kill, a shimmering distortion appeared off to the side of the battle. A distortion that suddenly yielded another fleet._

_A battle group of combat vessels that resembled armored, weapon-arrayed worms or serpents, surged ahead in thruster-powered undulation, sidling up into the rear of the Yolkian fleet and proceeding to hammer the rearguard with long-range missiles._

_The _Henn_ Class hospital frigate, desperately trying to evade the salvo, was the first to go up, splitting itself into fatal quarters. Escape pods launched seconds from the explosion, couldn't distance themselves far enough and fast enough, and were crushed against the onrushing wreckage._

_A missile barrage corkscrewed and maneuvered through and around the wreck of the hospital ship and slammed with titanic force against the side of the carrier, breaching the silvery, armored hull and releasing the vast stockpiles of starfighter fuel and touching off energy cores. The resultant spill and spark created a killing blast, a kinetic beast that violently ate its way out of the center of the ship as though ripping from its mother's womb._

_The remnants of the first invading fleet, ignoring the battered hulks of their number that couldn't fight, turned hard and attacked the remaining Yolkian ships._

_The two _Capon_ Class corvettes were easily dealt with concentrated meson cannonade from the new fleet's two destroyers, which then moved into striking distance of the last Yolkian destroyers, _RAS Cluck of War, Battle Rooster_, and _The Grim Gullet

_Now caught in a classic Pincer move between both invading fleets, the beaten Yolkian warships used their remaining engine power to position themselves into a maneuver Yolkian commanders called the Scratching Star. By having their ships' backs to each other and all of their weapons pointed wide at a surrounding enemy, they could create a sphere of outgoing fire that would keep the foe back, if not outright destroy them._

_The Yolkians showered blasts into the forward shields of the battlecruisers and enemy destroyers, exacerbating damage on the already scarred ships of the first fleet, and merely hammering futilely on the deflectors of the second._

_At once, both fleets opened up their fiercest barrage of the fight. The _Cluck of War _was decapitated, its headless hulk listing dangerously close to the _Grim Gullet_, its "head" on fire and tumbling into Yolkus' atmosphere._

_The _Grim Gullet_, accelerating away from a possible collision with the ruins of _Cluck of War_, flew into the few working forward guns of a first fleet destroyer, ripping the port thruster "leg" apart and causing the vessel to ponderously spin in tight turns out towards the edge of the star system like a flaming pinwheel._

_The _Battle Rooster_, instead of fighting, put all its thrust into ramming speed and managed to clip a second fleet battlecruiser, crippling it, before collateral damage and a main power core breach, finished the proud avian ship at last._

_The two fleets, wading through the floating, irradiated wrecks that now littered Planet Yolkus' orbit, began their mighty descent into the atmosphere, the first fleet, like spiked anvils, the second, like iron dragons._

_It was only after they reached a respectable distance from the surface, that the bombardment began, and cities that once resembled vast, glittering Faberge Egg displays, soon became cratered, hellish wastelands._

_As the sun of Yolkus was getting choked from the smoke of burning buildings and frying residents, a final glint reached the sides of the two fleets' command ships that lead the attack, illuminating the battle-scarred insignias of the Needleheads and the Gorloks..._

Commander Baker sat back and stared thoughtfully at the screen, his mind blank so as not to expect anything. Apart from observing the fall of a planet, a government, and perhaps, a species, he wondered why situations like these continued to happen to _his_ planet. Regardless, he held no love for the Yolkians, of that, he was certain.

In the dark of one of the conference rooms in the hidden headquarters of one of the United States' most covert intelligence agencies, the BTSO, the Big Top Secret Organization, Baker looked to either side, trying to gauge the reactions of the other audience members in attendance. Scientific advisors from NASA, SETI, and the European Space Union, a liaison to the President, and, looking imperious and stony in the gloom across a seated Jimmy Neutron, three-star Army General Ernest Abercrombie.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Baker intoned. "What you were seeing was a recording taken from a surviving Yolkian research satellite four days ago. It appears that we've reached a moment of crisis."

No, Commander Baker," Abercrombie said with mocking civility, "What we have here is a moment of _truth. _The truth being that we can't trust none of those darn aliens."

Baker didn't reply, but instead turned his head in a glance to the figure displayed on the large, teleconference monitor that had descended from the ceiling over on the other side of the table earlier.

The figure was female, swathed in a ghostly white gown that made the silvery skin of her face glow. Her soft, violet eyes coolly gazed at the general and then back at the commander, who looked thoroughly embarrassed at the officer's tactlessness.

"Please," Baker placated diplomatically. "Forgive him for his rudeness, Your Majesty. He was not referring to you directly. The situation has unnerved him, as it has unnerved all of us."

The princess raised a slender argent hand in peace. "Be not troubled, good Human. Your compatriot is correct in feeling the way he does. This is indeed a grave threat, made all the graver, since your people lack the technology to counter such a force."

"People, may I introduce Her Highness Yorai'ness Jurma'chesty, Princess of Rhonacor. She is an alien. Her people came to Earth with that recording and addressed the U.N. on what we just saw. The invaders will arrive in our solar system in a month's time, but she has something that may give us an edge when they show up on our doorstep."

"Rhonacor, the seat of government for the entire Tiara Star Cluster," Jimmy thought to himself aloud. "Some 958 light-years southwest of here."

The princess turned to look Jimmy. "Correct, young Human. How did you come to know this?"

"We've got the Galactic Cable Network at home and I saw a documentary on your people on _Planetary Discovery_."

"Yes, that was a good episode on us," Yorai'ness mused conversationally. "But I feel that they should have focused more on today's reign as opposed to earlier ones."

"Yes, but what about their mention of the fourtieth dynasty under Cheynebush'con the Devious? That was most factual in relating to the early political intrigue of that region of space."

"Is this gonna be some egghead quilting bee?" Abercrombie cut in. "Or are we gonna get some work done?" He looked unapologetic as he opened a dossier near him and disdainfully slid the files out across the table to stop just short of Baker.

"What about Jimmy Neutron," the general groused, saying the boy's name as though tasting something bitter. "He had contact with both of those species and those Brains when he and his friends ran into that Meldar fella." Then added, "_After_ they broke into _my _base and turned on that stone...thing."

"Yes, I understand what he did, General," Baker said. "And if it weren't for he and his friends' quick thinking and handling of the situation, Earth would have been destroyed."

"Oh, yeah? So why didn't he tell any of us about them after he returned home? If these Gorlons-"

"Gorloks," Jimmy corrected.

"Er, and these Needlenoses-"

"Needleheads," Jimmy corrected again smugly.

"_Whatever_ they are," snapped the general. "Why didn't he warn us about them? We might have developed a defense against them when the time was right."

"Uh, you don't have to speak as though I'm not here. I'm right across from you, General," Jimmy said, long weary of the man's condescension and dangerous close-mindedness in times past. "Besides, there was nothing to warn about."

Baker scanned through the files that related to _Neutron, James Isaac_, placing his thin glasses on his nose for effect.

"According to the information he gave us concerning alien races he's had contacted with, the Gorloks decided to go into television programming to protect the galaxy from Meldar Prime, and they presently have him incarcerated, forced to do shows and commercials of their choosing. The other aliens who participated in the TV show, Intergalactic Showdown, the Brains and the Needleheads, just went back to their worlds."

"That's right, Commander Baker," Jimmy said. "I can't believe that they would turn bad like this. They assured me that they all just wanted to go home and live peacefully. That's all"

General Abercrombie gestured to the monitor, now frozen on the image of another continental bombardment. "They sure look peaceful _now_, don't they?"

"Whatever their motivations, we _will _prepare for them," the commander said with grim confidence. "Neutron has been called in and will be brought up to speed on this. His-"

"Are we having a tea party, too?" General Abercrombie railed, then turned to Jimmy. "You're a _kid._ You're a _civilian. _Worst, you're a _kid civilian_!"

"Wha-what...What does that have to do with..." the boy sputtered in shocked indignation. "As many times as I've risked my life to save Earth, you've got nothing better to do than split hairs about age and competence? If _that _was the issue, _old man, _then I daresay this town would have been a FEMA footnote thanks to your startling leadership."

Abercrombie stood up in an instant, leaning across the table to glare into Neutron's eyes with menace. "You got something to say to me. Dippity-doo Head?"

To his credit, Jimmy stood up to the general, as well. "As a matter of fact, I do, General Malaise!"

Baker stood next and raised his large arms in a peacekeeping gesture. "Gentlemen!"

"Well, he started it," Abercrombie muttered.

"Did not!" Jimmy defended.

"Did, too," the general shot back.

The commander felt less like the commander of an intelligence agency and more like a day-care worker. An apologetic glance to the monitor displaying the princess's dismayed face set the seal for his professional shame. "We're not usually like this during a crisis," he told her while the yelling over the table continued. He turned his attention back to the bickering duo gravely.

"Gentlemen," the commander said sternly, his fingers drumming very close to a phone built into the table before him. "Don't make me call your mothers."

With a look as though someone had poured ice water down their pants, both adversaries gave sobering thought to having to deal with parents cruelly disapproving of their fight, and back off into their seats again.

"Look, we need professionals in on this," said Abercrombie. "Soldiers, not some uppity egghead telling us which way the wind blows. Men that'll bust heads, not think with 'em! Wait...that didn't, that didn't sound right..."

Baker just sighed. "General, despite how you may feel about those who _don't _put on a uniform, Neutron is the most qualified person alive when it comes to alien species that he encountered. He is an honorary member of this agency and, as I'm sure you've read from the report, risks his life to help our country's agents like Jet Fusion whenever he can. I personally vouch for him, and he and his friends have my respect."

The general rolled his eyes, mumbled and then dismissively turned his attention to the otherworldly guest on the monitor.

"How about it?" he asked brusquely. "What do you have that'll get our bacon out of the fire when the time comes?"

"Commander Baker, would you be so kind as to take out the device I had sent to your people?" The princess quietly bade, as the commander took a thick metal disk from his jacket pocket and placed it on the table. From its center, a lens projected a blue beam that expanded into an slowly rotating image half a yard square. A large, silvery-white, domed building of atypical architecture was prominent, alongside its information, schematics, and stats, that were etched in flowing, illuminated alien script.

"This will be the means of delivering your world from the menace of the invaders," she told them. "These are the plans for a new type of technology."

Gesturing to the image, she explained. "This structure is called an Omnifactory, an advanced manufacturing facility capable of building just about anything one might need, provided there is enough raw material for it to work with. My royal vessel has the only working prototype and I am willing to share it with your people. As I told the dignitaries of your United Nations this morning, once the Omnifactory is placed on your planet, I will order it to construct more Omnifactories and these will then be distributed to countries across the globe to work in concert with one another to produce these..."

She waited until the hologram shifted images, and then the three-dimensional appearance of large, sleek warships and starfighters in clean white hull paint, emblazoned and emboldened with the stylized image of a blue Earth, spun from top to bottom, displaying weapon features, hull metallurgy, optimum shield strength, crew compliment and engine rating.

"These will be the backbone of a new planetary fleet, a fleet that will serve Earth. The height of my people's technology will be the key that will open the door to a new era for _your_ people, ladies and gentlemen."

"Very generous, Princess," said Myrna Proton, the President's liaison. "But why would you bother to help us anyway? Your world and ours has never met before. We've not had any diplomatic dealings with you before now."

The alien shown a look both understanding and full of fathomless sadness. "This gesture, I make, because my people didn't live long enough to enjoy a dialogue with you, Miss Proton. Yolkus was not the first world to fall into the hands of the evil ones. My planet, the seat of my kingdom, was caught off guard by the invaders' spies and saboteurs. What they didn't incorporate into their own technology, they burned, along with my kin and countrymen."

The woman mirrored the alien's expression, shame creeping into her features for sounding like such a hard case so soon after meeting her. She wondered if Abercrombie's influence was contagious, since she swore that it had to be the reason for her logical skepticism to be colored with callousness. "I'm sorry."

"Thank you for your understanding. When it was learned from our spies that Earth would be next, I had to act. I simply don't want your planet to suffer the same fate as mine and others. Plus, keep in mind that the Gorloks have possession of Meldar Prime's two Matrix Generators."

Jimmy jerked back in somber memory of the two small, crystalline devices that the evil show host wore as cufflinks, but, through what could only be considered some of the highest of alien super-science, gave Meldar godlike powers of energy manipulation, teleportation, matter transmutation and probably any other effects he could have had access to before he was defeated.

"Leaping leptons!" he swore. "The Gorloks are a warlike species, but have no spacefaring technology. I don't want to believe that they would do this, but if their war machine is powered by the energy of the Matrix Generators..."

"Yes, Jimmy Neutron," the princess said. "The Gorloks would follow their instincts and give birth to a stellar empire of blood and brutality that hasn't been seen in ages. We have to stop that nightmare from happening."

"Then on behalf of our nation, we would be honored to accept your technology," Jimmy boldly told her. The other scientists also began voicing their support, and it wasn't long until Ms. Proton told the alien noblewoman that the president would have a decision very soon.

Only General Abercrombie remained stoically silent, his eyes glinting in the dim room in thought. A look that Commander Baker noticed easily. If the President agreed to this, Ernest would have to go along with it, despite his apprehensions, founded or otherwise.

"What about it, General?" the commander said. "Do you have anything to say on this?

The general's flinty eyes moved quick and harsh across every face in the room. "Yeah, I've got one thing and only one thing to ask the good princess there." His gaze settled hard on the monitor that shone the princess's fair, metallic face.

"And what would that be, General Ernest Abercrombie?" she asked formally, straightening her bearing as though getting ready to repel a personal attack, but keeping her face diplomatically passive.

"This," he growled, then suddenly brightened into a sheepishly questioning look as he asked, "Could you have one of those doohickeys make me a chair with good lumbar support? I get the worst kind of back pain if I don't get the right kind of support, y'know?"

Among the audience that sat bewildered at that, Commander Baker and Jimmy Neutron looked honestly exasperated, and the alien princess, whose name and bloodline once commanded a stellar nation at its height, looked absolutely flabbergasted.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three

The sharp peals of laughter that sang commonly and familiarly in the '50s-style restaurant, The Candy Bar, was always a welcomed thing, and Cindy and Libby were certainly there to contribute to the merry air of the place.

"Remember that lady we helped across the street yesterday?" Cindy asked as she took a breath from laughing. "That woman was huge! Geez, her ankles were so big, I thought she was were flesh colored boots."

"Tell me about it," agreed Libby with a grin. "And what about those clothes she wore? Ugh! That stripped muumuu? Last time I saw that much fabric hangin' over something, the circus was in town."

More laughs and more sips from their smoothies as the concerns and politics of the school day was eased away. Cindy chuckled a little more at Libby's observation while she bobbed her head in time to a favorite song blowing out of the jukebox nearby.

Things seemed to flow into place for her. Jimmy was really late for school and he'd probably get into some mild, but incapacitating trouble for it, like more detentions. _For a genius, he sure spends a lot of time in the 3 o'clock penalty box_, she mused.

Libby noticed her friend's introspection. "What you thinking about, girl?"

"Oh, I was just thinking about Nerdtron," Cindy told her.

Libby gave a sly, knowing smile. "Oh, I see. Can't get him out your mind, huh?"

Cindy flushed and she fumbled to look unconcerned as she added, "No! I mean, no, I wasn't thinking about him that way. I was just thinking that he came in really late this morning."

Unbelieving, Libby said, "If you say so, Cin."

"No, it's true, Libby. Completely on the up-and-up," Cindy said quickly, and then said more conspiratorially, "Still, if you must know, Neutron and I _have _been planning a little trip away this weekend."

This perked Libby up noticeably. She leaned in close so their words would be contained by the two heads. "I thought so. Okay, girl, spill! Where are you two going? Gracieland? The Mansion of Blues? The Funk Factory?"

Her musically inclined best friend's choice of hot spots notwithstanding, Cindy answered in a whisper. "The Rainbow Nebula."

Libby stared dumbfounded, shocked firstly because it wasn't musical venue she knew of and secondly because it wasn't even on Earth.

"Out in space?" she confirmed. Cindy nodded. "Cindy, you can protest all you want, girl," Libby told her amusedly. "But you and Jimmy are birds of the same nerdy feather."

"Oh, please," Cindy predictably protested. "I'm nothing like Neutron. I have a life, for starters."

"But what does this Rainbow Nebula have that The Soft Rock Bistro doesn't?"

Cindy softened her defense and wistfully remember the images Jimmy showed her of the last time the phenomenon occurred.

"Every thirty-eight years, certain comets from the Ort cloud that's just outside our solar system, get tugged by our sun's gravity into a kinda rough alignment, like a shining road made of comet "bricks", pointing in the direction of the Rainbow Nebula. Neutron says that it's one of the romantic-" Cindy cut herself off, as if someone had taken control of her, and in her mind, that wasn't too far from the truth.

Libby, still engrossed, prodded, "What? Romantic what?"

"I forgot. My mother. I can't. I mean, I probably won't be able to," Cindy fretted. "I forgot."

"What? What did you forget?"

Cindy irradiated regret as she slumped a little in their booth and just moaned quietly, "Nothing. It's okay, Libby."

She nursed her smoothie absently as she stared at the tall glass that contained it. Now, she couldn't even hear Libby asking her what was the matter as they sat in their booth. Her voice, the ambient sounds of the workaday world outside the window and the quiet chatter of patrons and the jukebox, couldn't disrupt the internal self-interrogation Cindy was giving herself. Then, a buzz caught her attention.

"You say something, Libby?" she finally said.

"I said, "Are you alright?"

"Oh, uh, yeah. Just had a lot on my mind, that's all."

"Then let's lighten the load a bit, girlfriend," Libby offered. It was too clear something troubled her best friend, and her nature wouldn't allow that kind of thing to go unchallenged. "C'mon, talk to me."

In the time it took for Cindy to sigh, she weighed the need to get it off her chest against her need to internalize and just deal with it like she had always done. In the end, she couldn't say no to a helpful friend.

"My mom and me had a fight this morning," she confessed quietly, looking down to her smoothie.

Libby, preparing for the worst, blew a sigh of relief at that. "Oh, girl, is that all? All kids fight with their parents sometimes, even cool, collected me sometimes, like when my mother picks out clothes for me and forgets that this is the twenty-_first_ century, or when my dad gets all stingy with the allowance and I can't buy that new Outta Sync CD when it comes out, even though I aced that history test and he promised that he would step up my paper, and you'd think he'd be fair and all, because he real quick to give my baby brother some money and he doesn't do any chore around the house hardly, and when I come to him about it, he's all like, "Go talk to your mother," when I know he's giving my little brother a bigger allowance, and I can't talk to her when Opal Windfreeze is on-"

"Whoa, Libby!" Cindy cut her off, holding her hands in a "time-out" position. "Excessive ranting. Ten yard penalty." She was surprised to see her normally composed friend vent with increasing fury about her own home life. She had to stop her or she would have been buried in the deluge.

Panting a little and feeling sheepish, Libby said calmly, "Sorry about that. Well, anyway, what's wrong with you and you mom having words?"

"Because usually, we don't," Cindy fretted. "I was the only child and for a while I had their attention, but when I started getting a little older, my mom started pushing me towards stuff like piano lessons and karate classes and private tutors for awhile. Now, it's like she thinks of new things for me to enroll me in. I know she loves me, but I wonder sometimes if the things I'm good at are because I like them or because I was forced into them."

She stopped for a moment, expecting Libby to respond, but to her friend's credit, Libby just sat there, doing the best thing she could do for her...listening.

Cindy looked wistfully out the window to the streets, to the sky. "I wake up one day and I find myself questioning my identity. What do I truly like and what I don't like. Back when I was younger, I though that was what I had to do. Now, I can't even daydream when my mother's around or I get lectured on what being a Vortex is," she chuckled bitterly.

"Some girls have one diary. Thanks to my mom, I have whole volumes. I mean, what was I put on this Earth for, Libby? Just to make my mom happy by filling her trophy wall with stuff I don't know if I even like anymore? I've read about those child stars and how they flipped out because of their folks. I can see where she's pushing me and I don't want to go that route. I just want to find things out for myself, test the waters myself, not have my mother pick and choose the things I may want or the life I'm to lead."

"Well, what caused the fight?"

"Mom apparently felt that having a boyfriend was the way to go, so she tried to play matchmaker and told me she was going to hook me up with someone. Like I can't choose who I want."

Now the suspense had gotten to Libby. She had to know. "Who? Who was she trying to hook you up with? I promise I won't tell!"

That remark earned a reproachful glance towards Libby. Secrets had an annoying way of leaving Libby's confidence once she was told of them.

That glance told Libby that very sentiment, and she picked up on it fast. "Aww, c'mon, Cindy. You know I won't tell anybody. I promised you guys after Corky Shimatzu fired us from doing the local news, remember?"

The pleading look in Libby's big, brown eyes began to melt the wall Cindy had brought up to hide behind. "Well, okay," she sighed. "But I left the house in a huff before she could tell me. I wanted to tell her about Neutron and me, but I was afraid she'd think he wasn't good enough for me. I still do, I guess. I felt like I was battling for my _life _this morning. Every time I'd tell her that I wanted to find the guy who was right for me, she'd pooh-pooh it and say that I was just being silly and that a Vortex must connect with the upper class, no matter the age. I felt backed into a corner, I-I couldn't breathe. I had to stop her from running my life this way."

"What did you do?'

"I...I told her to stop messing my life up and I...I threw a vase down and broke it. Then I grabbed my book bag and ran out of the house. I didn't want to catch the school bus because I didn't want to deal with anybody so I walked to school."

"That's why you were late, too. You've never been late to school in your life."

"Yeah," Cindy agreed, looking down at the table top to hide her moistening eyes. However, holding back her emotions was starting to make her voice harden. "But you know what, I don't care. I'm starting to understand that all my mother wanted was some little doll she can control, some thing to hang the name Vortex on. She doesn't care about anything unless all the "i's" are dotted and all the "t's" are crossed. I just don't feel like I'm _me _anymore."

Libby found it hard to say word of comfort just then. They would just sound hollow and false now. She always had her suspicions regarding Cindy and her mother. How Mrs. Vortex would drive her daughter to achieving excellence, more often than not, at the cost of any true bonding with Cindy. The girl would put on brave face whenever Libby would visit, true, and she would laugh the incidents away breezily enough when asked, but it didn't take Dr. Spock to see that that part of Cindy's heart, the part that needed the nurturing that only a mother's unconditional love could give, was dying like a wasteland.

Cindy, for her part, could see so very clearly the turmoil behind her friend's eyes, the sense of helplessness in the face of this. She couldn't let Libby feel as lost as she was feeling. It felt wrong to drag her down into her emotional hell.

The sight of Carl and Sheen walking into the restaurant and sauntering up to the counter to place orders to Sam, the proprietor, helped to put her wall back up.

"Hey, don't worry about it, Libby," she consoled with brightening false cheer. "Like you said, it's probably nothing. Just me having a temper tantrum. It'll blow over when I get home."

Libby looked at Cindy worryingly. "Are you sure? I mean, I could-"

Cindy suddenly turned to the far counter and waved at the two boys who sat there, "Hey, Carl! Sheen! You two wanna sit over here? We can wait until Neutron shows up and I make him buy me a Purple Flurp."

Libby sadly took the cue to back off and put on her best face for Carl and Sheen as they walked both amicably, and a little apprehensively towards the girls' booth with their drinks.

Jimmy shambled into the Candy Bar, drained and frustrated. The meeting shed some light on the situation concerning the attack on Yolkus, in that they were a somewhat legitimate threat in that section of the galaxy to the new belligerents, but the question of why it was _those_ particular species still eluded him, and that worried him deeply. He was beginning to feel foolish and betrayed for believing in their supposed good natures.

_I have to sort this out_, he thought depressingly. _I need a drink and to clear my head. Things'll get better then._

Like a zombie, he slowly walked up to the front counter and waited to be served. Sam Melnitz, the owner-operator, turned to Jimmy, wiping a wet glass with a cloth.

"What can I get for ya, yeah?" he asked.

"Milkshake." Jimmy managed to mumble wearily. "Strawberry."

"Rough day, eh, kid?"

"Yeah, you could say that, Sam," the boy sighed. "And it'll probably get a lot worse before it gets better."

"I hear ya, yeah," Sam commiserated as he went over to the mixing machines to prepare.

Jimmy laid his head down on the counter and debated internally on whether or not he should just nap there until closing time. He would have loved to tell his friends about the meeting, about the attacks and the imminent invasion, and the plans that they would hatch to deal with it, but because of the chilling severity of the crisis, he was constrained by Commander Baker's direct order of non-disclosure for the sake of national, if not global, security.

The argument for sleep was about to win his favor, when a thin finger tapped his shoulder firmly. With bleary vision, he turned and slowly focused on the visage of Cindy Vortex, smiling pleasantly enough. However, Jimmy knew that a smiling Vortex was as much a danger as a delight. Still, decorum had its demands. "Hi, Cindy."

"Hey, Neutron. Uh, I was just wondering if we're still go on that little trip this weekend? 'Cause, y'know, we had been planning it for awhile and the celestial alignment won't happen again for another thirty-eight years and I kinda had my heart set on seeing it before it passed and all."

Jimmy responded to all of that with a distant, "Hmm?"

Cindy looked sadly confused, but remained tactful, passing off the reply with a practiced, falsely nonchalant laugh. "Oh, you. C'mon, you can surprise me, if you want." Then she dipped her hotly-blushing head towards his conspiratorially. "We can even take the scenic route through the Ort cloud, if you want. Might take us _hours_ to get through that on auto-pilot."

No response registered on his face, save for a weary, yet intensely thoughtful scowl that shielded him from any and all conversation, flirtatious or otherwise.

At any other time, Cindy might have seen this as a sign that he wasn't interested in talking to her, and would have made herself scarce due to lack of interest. But today, her emotions were high and she needed to talk, and to him only.

Libby was her best friend, and yet sometimes it took a Herculean effort to confide in her sometimes. But these were also the times when she needed to test the new waters of her and Jimmy's relationship and try to confide some things to _him _and vice versa. It seemed only fair.

This inelegant reminder of their trip was the only thing she could think of to ease herself into relating the events of this morning to him, and, of course, he wouldn't even notice. Typical Neutron, she thought.

"Look, I'm trying to be a good conversationalist, here. The least you could do is acknowledge me. I mean, it's not like I didn't have a choice to come here. I was perfectly happy talking to Libby over there."

"Uh-huh..."

"Blood boiling... "cool", losing...ego bruised..." Cindy emoted darkly to herself under her breath, twitching slightly as though fighting to stop the emergence of a cough. "What's wrong with you? What's so important that you have to ignore me? _Me! _I thought we could talk to each other. Help each other out of tough scrapes, but I guess you were just full of hot air, huh? I would say _helium_, but I can see you're saving that to keep that head of yours that pleasant size."

Jimmy jerked back into the here-and-now as though he were electrified, thoroughly aggravated. A startled and collective _Ooohhh..._ hit The Candy Bar like a wave, and then all was hushed so the patrons could hear undisturbed.

"What do you want, Vortex?" Jimmy fumed.

"I just want you to talk to me, that's all. I thought we were friends. Friends talk to each other? Hello?"

"Hello!" he answered back sarcastically, "And I can't right now. I have a lot on my mind and not a whole lot of time figure it out. Pester someone else."

Cindy felt like she was hit with a baseball bat full of indignity. "Pester? Did you say, "pester"?"

"I didn't stutter, Vortex." he said coolly.

"Hey, look, I thought I could come to you and talk to you about my problems. Me and my mom fighting doesn't have to be front page news, but I thought you'd understand.

Perplexed and annoyed, Jimmy explained, "What's going on is a matter of life or death on this planet and I have to help with the ongoing preparations she started for-"

"_She?"_

Jimmy waved the utterance away, mentally kicking himself for that near-treasonous blurb. "Never mind." Then he caught what Cindy had just said. "Wait a minute. How come you and your mother were fighting?"

"Oh, _now_ you're interested, huh?

"Yeah, maybe _now_ I'm interested."

"Well, what's there to tell, Curious Jimmy?" she snapped. "My mother's been an insufferable control freak for years? She wants me to be her precious little doll and plan my life right down to what socks I get to wear at my wedding? That she's planning to pair me off with someone I don't know and probably dislike?"

She then took a breath, collected her thoughts and resumed sarcastically. "Boy, I don't know why I even went to you, now that I think about it. Your home life is probably so on the money, you never had to worry about things like that. Your mom and dad must be angels to let you live your life your way, huh?"

"That's not how it is at home at all," Jimmy defended sharply. "My parents are happy with my choice to be a scientist, yes. They support my decision, but I get into just as much trouble as anybody else when I slip up, and I _do_. And I'm sure that if I wanted to be something else, something that gave them misgivings, they would tell me freely."

Cindy stood stock still for a moment while she processed what she heard. Why couldn't she have that kind of home life? The freedom and support to choose her paths along with the loving guardianship of the parent. Jimmy Neutron had it all, she fumed, and as quickly as her heart was saddened, it grew dark just as fast, and eyes once bright, were now dimming in hatred.

"My mother probably doesn't like you, _genius_," she seethed, as though trying to explain a dangerous event on a soon-to-be-suffering half-wit. "Did you ever think of that? That she might be trying to break us apart?" She knew right then that she was giving away far too much of herself to him, to the people listening, but she was too angry to care. She wanted some kind of reaction from him. If he couldn't be bothered to listen, then maybe she could shake him up as punishment.

Though she couldn't see it, Jimmy _did_ shudder fearfully at the notion of that. He had a list of enemies that would have made Elliot Ness proud, and it was the errant thought of just losing her that gave him a moment's pause.

Jimmy took a breath, saying, "I hope that's not the case, Cindy. I don't know how to convince your mother not to think that way about me, but I can't worry about that right now, anyway. Something's come up and I'm sorry to say that you're not at liberty to know what's going on right now."

"Ugh! I don't care what nerdy math problem you're caught up in this time, Neutron," Cindy sneered dismissively, but then added, "But if there's a "she" involved, I think I'm entitled to know about it."

"It's not what you think, okay?" Jimmy said, his annoyance level rising again. "This is something a little more pressing than your female temper tantrums at the moment. Now I need to think."

"Temper tantrum?" Cindy could feel the eyes of everyone on her, waiting to see what she would say next. Or _do _next.

Jimmy had turned fully around now and was facing her. His angry blue eyes staring down into her liquid green ones, and almost regretting it. Those eyes. Those green eyes. "That's right, _Mizz_ Vortex, but guess what? I'm no virgin when it _comes _to your temper tantrums, and so I shall employ a basic stratagem men have been using on women since time immemorial. I'm going to ignore you."

To everyone in the know, that became a bolder strategy than even thinking up an insult or actually challenging her to a fight. Everyone knew she was a karate student, so Jimmy took his life, if not his jaw, into his own hands if he did call her out. No, more known that even that was the undisputed fact that she delighted in being the center of attention, and would do anything to remain so, through subtly, or far lesser means.

Cindy's ego twisted in the heavy near-silence of the room, the only sound intruding being the juke's music. The patrons' expectation for her to fight back jabbed into her heart torturously. If there was one thing she was grateful her mother instilled in her, it was the knowledge that Vortexes never backed down, from a challenge, or anything else. "Ignore me? Ignore _this_!"

_Splat!!! _

The frothy, pink contents of Jimmy's untouched milkshake touched his face and hair rather violently, as Cindy slammed the glass back down on the counter, the rushing blood making her ears hot with frustration and embarrassment.

"That's it, Vortex. That's it. I've had it with you!" Jimmy screeched through a veil of dairy product amid raucous guffaws from all around. "You are certifiable! Do you hear me?! Certifiable!"

He hopped off his stool and stomped fast to the doorway, wiping milkshake from his reddening face with a vengeance.

Jimmy shoved his way past the doors and soon disappeared into the hustle of late afternoon pedestrian traffic, leaving a triumphant-looking Cindy in his messy wake.

Although she looked like the cat that ate the canary, behind Cindy's eyes, the same secret shame that always haunted her steps whenever she wrecked something wonderful between her and Neutron, festered like an unchecked plague in her heart.

Again, she just couldn't come up and say what she felt without turning it into a fight, and, as usual, she hated herself for her cowardice. Cowardice in not dealing with her mother. Cowardice in hardly ever taking Libby's advice, and cowardice in throwing up barbed-wire walls that did nothing but shut Jimmy out of her life again.

Through the catcalls and whistling that profited the whole affair, Cindy tried to find spiritual solace in the understanding face of a best friend.

She suffered in silence however, under the crushing, disapproving shake of Libby's head and the deep brown eyes that dimmed with disappointment.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter Four

The main computer's monitor in Jimmy's subterranean laboratory displayed the Gorloks' star system for the sixth time, and for the sixth time, Jimmy debated with himself on the notion of just going to their planet and discussing the situation, asking why they would take such an aggressive stance against Earth.

And then the same answer, him being captured as a prisoner of war and most likely forced to give information on his people and technology, rose up to greet him.

The same outcome rose to meet him whenever he would think about wanting create a dialogue with the other species that seemingly befriended him, the Needleheads and the Brains. Space travel, at least through those areas that were under their attacks, was out of the question.

This was serious. He still wanted to use diplomacy before things ran out of control. Abercrombie and his ilk were thirsty for blood and an alien's was just as good as any other foreign power's. And blood was the issue. Blood spilled by the millions on all sides and Jimmy forced by conscience and circumstance to give the full measure of his genius in creating defenses and devastating weapons for the coming war effort.

The Earth hadn't faced an invasion before and although the Yolkians did first appear on Earth, their mission then was abduction, not conquest. Now, this would be it. An invasion, a probable war both on the ground and in the heavens. _Were we capable of seeing that through? _he thought.

Apart from wunderkind like Jimmy, Humans were as children, to themselves, and to the galaxy at large. Jimmy was able to outpace his people's technology on a fair basis, but they would be facing species who have had untold years of evolutionary development augmenting their minds, sheer, tenacious cunning born of predation and a harsh environment, and the effective, efficient brutality of a warrior-class culture. Battling one would have been challenge enough, fighting the combined union of the three would have been suicidal.

And that was exactly how he felt going up there to their worlds to talk would have been, suicidal. Then there was the tactical aspect to consider. He befriended them in a time when they were at their lowest, their homeworlds about to be destroyed, and then he and his friends and father stepped in and helped save them. Meldar Prime was no threat afterwards. However, the source of his vast power, his Matrix Generators, were left in the hands of April, the Gorlokian girl, and her people.

If they were in the hands of the Brains, he wondered, would it have been less of a worry? Probably. Their vast intellect and psychic skills augmented with the power of the Generators would have made them a superpower in that quadrant of the galaxy. Yet, if their sense of right and wrong were as evolved as the rest of them, it might have been possible that they could have been a force for good and order in the galaxy. But it fell to the Gorloks.

It was the part of him that hated bullies, he knew, that colored his opinion of them. Brutish, violent, bloodthirsty and savage. That he got on their first meeting, but he had to give them the benefit of the doubt that now weighed on his mind like a ton of lead. What would a violence-prone species like that do with such power?

April promised that Meldar would never get a hold of his Generators again and said that her people would take over his production and make better shows than the one he was putting forth. Yes, she did promise that, and she and her people did delivery on that promise.

However, she could not have spoken for her people entirely. What if those in her government desired the power of the Matrix Generators and confiscated them? And worse, because they were not a spacefaring species then, what if they used the matter creating and transmutating powers of Meldar's cufflinks to create their first space fleet. A fleet dedicated to their need not to explore and contact, but to scout out and conquer. Unchecked aggression with the power of a god.

Jimmy could now see his charitable act becoming the forge that laced the chains of events together link by tragic link, as the now emboldened Gorloks would have surged forward with their new fleets, first seeking out the Brains and forcing them to capitulate and form an tactical alliance, then convincing the Needleheads to join as they had all proven their ability to work together for a common goal. Which then begged the question: why hadn't they sought out Earth to become part of this alliance?

What was missing? What did Jimmy and the others do in _Intergalactic Showdown_, or afterwards, that suddenly made them persona non gratis in the other aliens' eyes? Were they threatened by Jimmy's intelligence? It couldn't be, since they have the Brains in their league they weren't lacking for intelligence and actually seemed to have used it in their role as conquers rather nicely. Natural resources? Strategic location? Good neighborhoods with easy access to schools? Who knew? And time was being stripped away while the questions piled.

What did Earth have or didn't have that this dark alliance was reacting to? What did this _dark alliance _have or not have that it was reacting to?

Questions. And in the back of his brain, Jimmy knew that all of this could have been avoided if he had just gotten rid of those damned cufflinks. He wondered if Oppenheimer had days like this.

Between the morning with Calamitous, the meeting with Baker, and his ruinous run-in with Cindy, Jimmy was drained. In a corner behind him, he glanced protectively at Goddard, who reposed in powered down mode, the positronic, synaptic storm in his domed head, flashing and strobing at a more sedate pace, now.

Jimmy took a cue from that and sat up from his scavenged car seat and white-wall tire based computer chair, stretched with a groaning yawn, and then slumped through the set of moving doors adorned with the universal symbol for radioactive material, that opened up to a catwalk.

Off to the side, besides the overhead lights, the pathway was illuminated by the dominance of a huge, lit star chart that displayed the vast, yet local celestial neighborhood of stars that the Earth resided in in that arm of the galaxy.

Jimmy took a high, bleary-eyed look at where the Gorlok, Brain and Needlehead home systems were, as all celestial navigational information from the rockets he used, constantly updated the mammoth screen. He just stared up at them, still thinking, pondering. What was the reason? What was the connection?

Fear of his unintentional blunder with the Generators and the Gorloks swirled his stomach and made him take a deep breath to settle himself. No matter what happened, _he_ was the agent of doom to his planet, as he was with his first contact with the Yolkians, as he was with his shrink-ray blanketing over the whole town, as he was with every incident involving himself and his inventions, his good intentions or his arrogance.

It galled him to think that people like Cindy or General Abercrombie were right about him and that all would be right with the world were it not for his ever-creating mind. Perhaps he was a cautionary tale in the history of the world, like Victor von Frankenstein, one that warned about progressing too much, too soon. Was that it?

He knew he felt such doubt before, prior to the famed Meteor Incident, an event he himself instigated, and had managed to rectify, luckily. But it was just that. Luck, again. That simple, mystifying element that saved his bacon when even his own intelligence would fail him. An element that, it seemed, was just tapped out.

Mournfully, he turned back to his trek across the catwalk and soon reached the pair of similar moving doors on the other side. After they parted for him, he entered and walked up a curving corridor smoothly dug out of the earth and well lit. Among the several rooms that lined the corridor, one got his attention.

When they parted, Jimmy entered a comfortable chamber that held a bed, a desk with a lamp, an intercom and an alarm clock, and a small library along one wall. This was his "crash pad", as he called it. A place to sleep during those times when he was tired but needed to be close to his lab.

He trudged over to the bed and simply collapsed, and in a little while, he was snoring soundly away.

_The Dream_...

_...was an old fashioned newsreel in all its monochromatic glory._

_Jimmy thought he was color-blind at first when he looked around silently. He was fully immersed in the world of wartime Americana and Allied propaganda that also merged with that era's dated visions of the future. He was a solitary spectator, watching in incredulous fascination to the lines of thick booted soldiers marching past him in patriotic step, yet wearing stylized uniforms and holstered laser pistols that made them look like extras in a 1930's Brash Cordon serial. _

_Also similar in appearance to the style of those movies were the fleets of robust, kilometer-long war rockets that cruised high above the Earth, their metallic skins catching the glint of the sun as they surged out to rendezvous with other flotillas that waited on the edge of the solar system. This he could see as clearly as if he were marching alongside the enlisted, or flying by the side of the Ships of the Line._

_The inference that this was a dream to him was about to be calmly embraced, but that calm was shattered by the sudden blast of corny, upbeat fanfare that heralded the stalwart, projecting voice of the newsreel's narrator. _

"_Newsflash! Earth...at...war!" the voice intoned dramatically. "The unbelievable just happened as alien aggressors hand Mother Earth a declaration of war via television, radio and the internet. _

_However, the extraterrestrials hadn't bargained with good ol' Earthling spunk!"_

"_The nations and the military of the world have answered to the coming threat in the form a secret star fleet that, rumor has it, was given to us by "good" aliens!"_

_The sights soon began to mesh and then shift into a cinematically phantasmagorical wipe into the next sequence of hyper-real visuals, columns of steel-gray, armored, four-limbed tanks with backs sprouting cannons that promised long-range lethality, shambled together in impenetrable herds. _

"_Too good to be true? Well, believe it, buster. We're here for the long haul! Never let it be said that the war wasn't fought that we couldn't finish! Still, our leaders know that it never hurts to hedge a sure bet, and so, our military forces scour the land not only for able-bodied recruits, but also for fresh new minds as well." _

"_Now that NASA has been conscripted to the military during this uncertain time, the military is also utilizing its think tanks around the globe in an effort to combat the alien menace."_

"_However, think tanks and defense contractors like Lockkneed Spartan are not the only resources on hand to help. Recently, the Top Brass have begun recruiting promising young brains from such institutions like Yale, Harvard and Pomona SAP."_

"_In fact, one such student who once attended there has been given the chance to truly shine in this dark time, little Jimmy Neutron, the child prodigy from Retroville, Texas."_

"_Little?!" Jimmy bristled._

"_As one of the youngest members of the nation's leading think tank, our James will be putting his mind to the task of finding weaknesses in the aliens' defenses, and developing corresponding weapons and defenses for our world under siege."_

_Squadrons of aerospace fighters screeched over the heads of a group of determined officers, who were saluting the rising sun before the fluttering backdrop of a flag that boldly displayed a stylized Earth in the center of a starry dark blue field._

"_Yes! For in the coming months, muscle will be needed to fight the aggressors and minds will be needed...to dream up new devices...new tactics...and new ideas...TO BEAT BACK THE ALIENS! _

_The black-and-white world of the newsreel faded around him to the crescendo of the reel's music score, and a lonely street corner flowed into being from where he stood. A small object floated into his vision from the dark void outside of the corner. _

_The Retroville Rag, the town's number two newspaper, crumpled and wind-tossed, settled on the toes of Jimmy's right foot. He picked up and felt a genuine shock._

"_Local Inventor Pressed into Wartime Service," the front page read with a picture of a tragically befuddled Jimmy below. He hadn't noticed, so engrossed he was in his reading, that the street corner he was standing on had, just as quickly, and just as quietly, became the interior of a large, white laboratory, and his customary red Tee and jeans were now shrouded by a lab coat adorned with a plastic badge._

"_Hey, Neutron!" a voice roared from behind him, making him jump and the newspaper fly crazily out of his hand. Jimmy spun to the sound and saw someone he hadn't expected. General Ernest Abercrombie stood imperiously by the front doors of the lab with a sly smile on his old, lantern-jawed face that looked every inch like he was enjoying this._

"_We ain't paying you to lollygag and read newspapers, son," Ernest said breezily. _

"_I'm nobody's "son" except Hugh and Judy Neutron's," Jimmy shot back, hoping to deflate the general. "Now, why am I here?"_

_Ernest strolled over to an oscilloscope and absently wiped his finger along its surface in mock concern for its cleanliness. "Welcome to Area 86, here in the Mojave Desert. This is war, son, and all the other Brass think they got the biggest brains around. Well, when they find out that I got the cream of the crop here with me, I'll be getting that sweet promotion to fourth and fifth-star general and you'll be sweating it out in my little corner of the world for as long as the war lasts."_

"_But, I don't think we need to go this route, General. I think we can come to an agreement with the aliens if we can hear them out. Know what their grievances are and work through them."_

"_Boy, for a genius, you ain't too bright. War is money, son, and war is power, especially if you're winning. You think grown-ups put away schoolyard fights when they grew up? Naw, son, we just up the stakes, is all. Who's to say that Ol' Mother Earth can't be the new big boy on the block?"_

"_The "block" being outer space."_

"_See, I knew you'd catch on eventually, kid. Your brains and my promotion and connections will see the Earth as the new superpower in space, with yours truly running things from on high as-"_

"_As what? A shogun? A military dictator?" Jimmy asked darkly._

"_I was thinking of the guy who's, uh...Who's the guy under the president that deals with the military?"_

"_You mean...the Secretary of Defense?"_

"_Yeah, but you think big! I like that!" _

_Abercrombie lazily looked at his watch and said to Jimmy, "Well, it's just about time to go to work, son."_

"_Work? Doing what?"_

"_Why, this, of course," said the general, as a table materialized in front of Neutron. On its surface sat a small, gutted, high-tech device, its power core, wiring and laser focusing apparatus was spilt out of its black, armored housing._

"_It's incomplete," the general said. "See what you can do with it." _

_Jimmy looked at the form and knew the function immediately, a laser pistol, and judging from the energy yield of the power core within, a handily lethal one at that. "Well, I know what I _am_ going to do with it," he told the man. "This thing's made to kill, so I'll just convert it into a less lethal stun gun."_

_The boy proceeded to strip wire, swap out microchips, and break down the laser focusing module and the power core into something that could deliver less of a punch when the laser penetrated the target body and irradiated its central nervous system._

_The gun was quickly reassembled and Jimmy tossed it to the general with a disdainful motion. As the general looked the weapon over with an appraising eye, Jimmy said, "See, I told you, General. I won't wake weapons that kill. Your soldiers can neutralize just as many enemies by stunning them as to killing them."_

"_True, true. We could stun our enemies into surrender," Abercrombie agreed while brandishing the gun and aiming at a far wall. "But I don't think we're fighting some granola chomping hippies here." _

_He squeezed the trigger and the destructive, crimson beam of light sprang out of the barrel and punched a smoking, clean-edged hole into the wall "Wouldn't you agree?" Jimmy's jaw hung open loosely in shock._

"_But...But, I just...I reworked..." sputtered Jimmy. Then he glared at the senior officer. "What did you do?"_

_Abercrombie gave as innocent a look as his sly, lined face could generate. "Me? Why nothing, son. You just do good work, that's all. You shouldn't be so modest."_

"_Modest, nothing, Abercrombie," Jimmy said venomously. "I changed that killer into a stunner. It should have been no more dangerous than a laser pointer in a boardroom."_

"_Well, war is business, too, kid," said Abercrombie matter-of-factly. "Wanna try again?"_

_Before Jimmy could think to look down on the table top to see what the man meant, a laptop computer appeared with a schematic of a powerful global shield delivery system displayed on its screen. Energy expenditures and output were listed along with an image of the myriad dots surrounding the computer model of Earth representing the satellites that would emit the energy necessary._

"_What's this? A planetary shield network?" Jimmy asked. "From the look of this, it's pretty capable of doing what it's designed to do, and surprising, coming from you, it's non lethal."_

"_There's always room for improvement, kid," Abercrombie said jovially. "How would the great Jimmy Neutron improve that?"_

_Jimmy looked hard at the screen, running ideas for better network efficiency, better response times between maintenance closedowns, greater shield output yields and stronger anti-hacking protocols to prevent foreign and domestic sabotage._

_Jimmy found it surprising that the program in the laptop allowed him to tweak, edit and modify the parameters of all of the shield network's systems as though he were playing a computer role-playing game. In a few moments, he had a network set to his exacting specifications and demands._

"_Done," he told the general. _

"_Hit Enter to send the data to the main monitor over there," Abercrombie ordered him._

_Jimmy did as he was told and a section of wall opened to reveal a large flat-screen monitor with his new network and their specifications._

"_Let's kick the tires on this one, son," Abercrombie said as he took a small remote control from a nearby table and pointed it at the large screen. From speakers hidden throughout the lab, a voice intoned, "Attack simulation beginning."_

_The simulation had the flawless look and feel of a movie as Jimmy watched a fleet of Gorlokian war vessels, in an arrowhead formation, bore down on what their apparently thought was an undefended planet. His curiosity for the proceedings turned into misgivings very quickly when the virtual camera panned to the satellites around Earth, and their function lights turned from a soft operational green to a fierce combative red._

"_What's going on, Abercrombie?" Jimmy asked, his voice rising with his panic._

_The general ignored the boy's informality with another innocent shrug of ignorance, though he couldn't hide the pleased smugness that radiated from him like heat._

_Jimmy turned back so he wouldn't miss what was about to happen in the simulation. Just in time, he could see one battleship flash in a cruel, blossoming fireball, then disappear, followed distressingly by another smaller vessel, a hospital ship from the battle reports scrolling up the side of the screen. Though the Gorloks fought hard against this satellite-borne shield system, very little power loss was shown from the Earth's side of the fight. However, Jimmy began to notice that for every volley that struck the shields, a corresponding number of smaller ships or one larger vessel would be destroyed in short order._

"_Computer," Jimmy ordered into the air. "Describe satellite defense system."_

"_The Neutron Override Incursion Software and Elimination, or N.O.I.S.E., system of satellites is designed to protect Earth and its colonial worlds from external attack in two revolutionary ways."_

_As the computer cheerily said this, the screen shifted from the battle and quickly zoomed in on one of the vaunted satellites. Concentric blue energy waves from a radiation belt that naturally encircled the Earth bathed the collector panels. _

"_Radiation from the Van Patten belt is collected and channeled into each satellite's focusing receiver, giving it a limitless supply of energy for its operations and for powering its shield matrix."_

_Plasma shots fired from the Gorloks' vessels also struck the shield, but did little more than raise the energy levels of the satellites in a given area attacked._

"_Energy from enemy ships' weapons also augment the power supplies of the satellite," the computer said. _

_Energy reemerged from the satellite's linking shield emitters as yellow concentric energy waves. _

"_This shield matrix, one of hundreds of thousands that make up the network, are added to all the other similarly powered satellites' matrices in a ever strengthening shell of energy."_

_The layers of thousands of individual satellites fed by the radiation belt, contributed their own shield energy to all the others, creating the now opaque yellow sphere that shrouded Earth._

"_Now that the planet is safe," the computer continued. "The second level of protection begins. Powerful communications software and equipment begin to penetrate the enemy ships' computers, copying their operating systems and downloading the data to dedicated supercomputers down on the ground, which read, decipher and decrypt the language to create superviruses, which are then uploaded back to the network and retransmitted via the satellite system back to the enemy craft, where they infect and sabotage within, resulting in fleet-wide self destructs."_

_Green concentric waves left the lifelike Gorlok ships and were soon exchanged for red concentric waves sent out from the network to touch the foremost ships in the fleet. Immediately, more ships suffered internal damage, as safety protocols in power cores were eliminated and the power plants gave their energy in unchecked quantities that couldn't be rerouted or shunted away fast enough, dooming the crews to explosive ship wide ruptures that space-froze those who weren't incinerated or irradiated in the catastrophe._

"_It was this secondary system, based on Professor Finbar Calamitous' work in radio signal override theory, that will allow James Isaac Neutron, and his company and private think tank, Neutronic Industries, to pave the way for Earth to become The First Terran Imperium, a government that Humans can proudly call their own, that has conquered over half of the western spiral arm of the galaxy."_

_Jimmy lost the function of speech as the computer's final words were graphically punctuated by the destruction of the last ship in the Gorlokian fleet. Its wreckage contributing to the alien junkyard that now floated above near-Earth orbit._

"_I knew ya had it in ya, son," Abercrombie praised him. Jimmy felt so numb, it was hard to hear the man._

"_No," Jimmy stared blankly at the simulated carnage and managed to whisper finally. "The shield wasn't supposed to do that. My work, my life, is not going to be washed in blood, Abercrombie. I don't care how many times you pervert my inventions. You won't make me into one of your close-minded killers."_

_The general chuckled a bit and smiled almost paternally at him. "Son, you gotta understand and you gotta believe me. It's not me doing this. It's you."_

"_Liar!"_

"_Look, son. It's your dream. You're doing all of this, for whatever reason you're doing it for. And don't try using non-Euclidean logic to prove that this isn't real, because it doesn't matter. You've got issues, kid, and take it from me, logic is the enemy here."_

"_Go away!" Jimmy screamed as he turned to face him. "And take your mind games with you! I won't be your tool, you war hawk!"_

And with that, Jimmy awoke in a screaming start, carried back into the real on the raw emotions he rode in the nightmare. He gasped quietly, drawing air to calm himself with, and tame his concussive heartbeat. His eyes unconsciously darting around the room from rattled nerves and naked expression.

_What did it mean? _he thought as he collected his tortured thoughts. _I have issues? About what? I have a right to do what I want with my inventions, and if I don't want to kill using my inventions, I don't have to. I'm in control!_

Jimmy got out of bed and went to the desk to check on the time. The clock read 6:10 PM, and Jimmy knew it would be time to get back home so he left the room and soon reached the main room of the lab. The main computer still showed the Gorlok homeworld from its image files since any real-time images were not feasible at that time.

Despite his misgivings, Jimmy still couldn't help thinking that the answer was out there, even if he also couldn't help thinking that it would be suicide to tryand seek them out.

He sat back down on his computer chair and rubbed his eyes. Then he reached over to the lab's phone and dialed his home's number. It rang twice before Hugh answered with his usual perk.

"Hi, Dad," Jimmy said listlessly. "Look, I'll be coming in from the lab in a few minutes. Is it dinnertime, yet?"

"Almost, Jimbo. Your mother's making her famous veggie-burgers. Better hurry up or they'll disappear faster than a flock of migrating wood ducks."

"Okay, Dad. I'm on my way," Jimmy said and then hung up, thinking.

With a sigh, he quickly dialed a number. The voice on the other end was one he was well familiar with. The cold haughtiness of it made him wonder why he even dialed.

"Vortex Residence. Sasha Vortex..._speaking_."

She had the icily dismissive tone of someone who deigned to speak to any plebian who had the audacity to call and wasn't, in her estimation, important. Jimmy was just surprised that he still hadn't gotten used to it, and, he mused mournfully, probably never would.

Cindy's warning that her mother might actually want to split the two of them up, hit him with stark realism. The thought of losing her prompted him to make the call. Between his government assignment and the stress of the nightmare, he needed someone to anchor him, to calm him. _Cindy. _He just wanted to talk to her, no matter how badly the day ended between them.

"Uh...Mrs. Vortex?" Jimmy meekly said into the receiver. "This is Jimmy Neutron...from across the street." Mentally, he slapped himself. _Of course she knows where I live_, he thought.

"Yes," Mrs. Vortex drawled condescendingly. " I know where you live, Jimmy. What is it?'

"I just wanted to ask if I could talk to Cindy."

"She hadn't come back from her visit to Libby's yet, but if you have a message, you can tell me and I'll be sure to pass it along to her when she comes home."

_Why do I feel like I just been transferred to an automated representative? _Jimmy thought. "Okay, Mrs. Vortex. Just tell her that I called and I'll try again later."

"Very well, then. I'll pass that along. Good _evening_, Jimmy," came the cool reply.

"Good evening, ma'am." Then he hung up.

Jimmy got up and walked over to the ladder and started to ascend dejectedly towards the clubhouse above. Things just didn't seem to be clicking for some reason and it seemed, as he told Sam in The Candy Bar earlier, that things were going to get worse before they ever got better.

Cindy luxuriated in the cool evening air on her way back from Libby's house. Coming to the small bridge in the neighborhood that spanned over the local stream's dark water, she decided to walk slower, so as to enjoy the night more.

In the back of her mind, she began replaying the humbling talk she had with her friend. Critical, sobering, and, in the end, needed. She didn't want to let go of Neutron without a dear fight, but, on the other hand, she was so new when it came to these feelings. It was so easy to lash out and lie. To do an emotional hit-and-run on Jimmy and pretend it was The Road Warrior. Cindy knew that it could only go on so long before it would ultimately end in either reconciliation or ruin.

Her better angel suggested that she apologize for earlier, and the closer she approached Jimmy's side of the block, the stronger the suggestion and the stronger the struggle her ego gave not to do it grew.

She walked, without thinking, across the yard towards the deceptively ramshackle clubhouse that stood in the back of The Neutrons' home. She thought to knock on the weathered door, but stopped before she could truly convince herself to do it.

_Coward_, she thought bitterly, as she stared instead at the red ocular sensor of VOX's DNA scanner, the only high-tech device contrastly visible on the weatherbeaten, wood-planked wall. It stared back, cold, unfaltering and seemingly judgmental. Cindy sighed and stood where she was, her head bowed.

"Jimmy..." she almost whispered at it. She half wanted him to hear her, half wanted to be undetectable, half wanted to defy him, and half wanted to apologize and hope he'd kiss her so hard, her hair would curl.

In the end, she allowed her ego the victory by telling herself that she was too tired to actively search for him and that she'd probably apologize to him when things cooled off between the two of them.

Crossing the street, Cindy gratefully reached home. A quick use of her house key, and she entered into the living room, where her father, unperturbed, relaxed with the Lifestyles section of the newspaper.

"Hi, dad," Cindy greeted as she prepared to take the stairs. "I'm gonna take a nap for a little while. I've had a busy day."

"Alright, Princess," came the indifferent reply from behind the barrier of printed page.

From the kitchen, Cindy's mother's voice stopped her daughter in mid-ascending step. "Is that Cindy?" she asked.

Cindy sighed. Her soft, welcoming bed was just yards away and now this. _The Vase Incident_, she thought_, is about to reach its loud, dumb conclusion._

"Yes, mom," Cindy called out.

"Where are you?"

"Halfway up the stairs."

"Come down for a minute. I have something to show you."

_I knew it_, she thought again. _She'll show me the pieces of the vase, and then I'll get The Lecture, and then The Rare Grounding. Best to just get it over with. _"I'm coming," she said to her

Cindy turned and trudged back downstairs, following her mother's voice towards the living room. Sasha Vortex stood by the kitchen doorway, watching her daughter stop warily by the living room entrance. She greeted Cindy with a proud smirk, so obvious was she that she was hiding something she had thought very highly of.

Something Cindy easily caught. "What's wrong, mother? What's happening?" she said uneasily, then added demurely, "I'm sorry about this morning, if that's what this is about."

Her mother brightened at that. "Oh, don't even worry about that, Cindy. Water under the bridge. You were simply blessed with that Vortex fire, that's all, and you were just distraught about entering into a perfect relationship with the right person."

Cindy couldn't understand where this was going, but it did remind her about her relationship with Jimmy and that she'd have to tell her mother about the two of them. Then a thought, or more likely, a hope, hit her.

"Did Jimmy call me, mom?" Cindy asked tentatively.

Sasha seemed to surprised to hear that, as though something like that was rare, if non-occuring. "No. I can't say that he has, darling. However, I want you to meet someone," she said, without missing a beat.

Crestfallen, Cindy readied herself for the visitor. She knew she had probably gone too far in The Candy Bar and now, she was paying for it. If Jimmy didn't want to have anything to do with her on a permanant basis...or worse, get driven into the arms of someone else. April the Gorlok? A more receptive Betty Quinlan?

"Who is it, Mom?"

"Someone very well placed in high society and whose parents are well known in this town," her mother gushed. "Someone a Vortex would be proud to introduce into the family one day."

"You're trying to fix me up again?" Cindy asked worryingly, getting more than a little exasperated by all of this. Obviously her mother wouldn't understand unless she was confronted with her daughter's decision. Inwardly, Cindy gathered all the strength she could muster for the confrontation this would generate, but she took a breath and said, "Listen, Mom. I...I already found-"

"Didn't your mother teach you not to question your elders?" came an oily voice.

Whatever air was left in her lungs departed with the sensation of being gut punched as she saw who stepped nonchalantly out of the kitchen.

Dressed in his customary silk-lined jacket, he watched her pleasantly with those green eyes that barely hid the ego- and megalomaniacal streak that colored everything he did. He bowed to her, favoring her his infamous overbite grin.

"No," was all Cindy managed to squeak out in the triumphant presence of Eustace Strytch.

"We were so lucky to get in touch with him and his family all those week ago," her mother told her warmly. "Young Eustace would be perfect for you, Cynthia. He's smart, ambitious and rich! He would be a blessing to this family. So, what do you think?"

Cindy felt as though her mother just let a cobra loose in the house and then turned off all the lights. Heart hammering at the knowledge that now, with Eustace in the equation, she really could lose Neutron, her inner voice railed at her to tell her mother everything about Jimmy and her.

Breathing shallow and suffering from a turning stomach, Cindy couldn't find the courage beneath the fear that Sasha wouldn't accept Jimmy. If her mother forbade her to see Jimmy, she couldn't find any other recourse but to obey, and that terrified Cindy.

All of this, Eustace could see played out across her stricken face. Ever the actor, he looked at her dispassionately, but from within, he was in dark ecstasy of the drama unfolding before him.

"I...I..." Cindy struggled to say while locking her eyes on his and hyperventilating. Hazy spots swam in the edges of her vision and her breath grew harder to draw, as if Eustace were slowly killing her from his distance from her, silently and unnoticed, like carbon monoxide.

"Something you'd like to add, Cindy?" Eustace dared to say, fighting to keep every ounce of his composure intact.

"I...I..."

Lightheaded, Cindy's mind, deciding enough was enough, took over. Her green eyes rolled up in her skull, her legs gave out, and the world moved past her in a numbed rush as she collapsed onto the floor, fainting dead away.


End file.
